Curated by Davine Byon
Aug 15- Sept 14 2025
Wood Street Galleries, Second Floor
Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Visual Arts
“A lawn does not have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch; are they still part of the lawn or not?”
–The Infinite Lawn, Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino
To create lawn, the artist collected real grass blades and pressed them between the pages of a small hardbound book of love poems by Emily Dickinson. After scanning the recto and verso of each blade of grass, they were separated within a softbound copy of “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. The scans were then enlarged, printed, hand-cut, reassembled, painted around the edge, and given a wooden and metal base resembling a high heel, blade hilt, or a piece of framing hardware. The original blades of grass were laminated to be preserved as bookmarks for a “bibliography of grasses,” a collection of books containing passages describing grass or lawns. Each blade of grass from the source lawns and the artist’s lawn maintains its sharp, un-mowed point.
The artist's handmade lawn, artificially engineered ‘real’ lawns, natural components within a living lawn, and the "bibliography of grasses” converge to question which iterations are organic or fiction. Playfully complicating these multiplicities is worm, a singular growing sculpture of an earthworm first created in 2016 as a manifestation of the anxiety-ridden narrator of Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow.” worm finds a new environmental context in lawn, which mirrors the materiality of its collected, constructed, blended parts and expands its narrative potentialities.
Photos by Chris Uhren, courtesy Lydia Rosenberg and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust
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